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"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-C. S. Lewis

This is round two. Round one was last year a minor skirmish in which I vanquished my opponents thoroughly. I didn't think they had the mettle to return to test my resolve but they did. Last year, starlings decided that my grill was a great place to make a happy home. There's a small vent/hole in the side of the grill that I suppose is there to prevent excessive gas buildup or something. Either that or the designers really liked birds and figured the grills that go unused would be excellent housing for homeless (nestless?) birds. I first noticed the infiltration had begun when I was having my morning beverage and looking out over the scenic view endless housing development. I was lost in thought and standing quite still in front of the sliding glass door. I saw a starling alight on the deck rail and give me the hairy eyeball. He had a long strand of cypress grass in his beak and gave me that "whadday ya gonna do about it chump?" look that only starlings can g…

So last week I was telling you about the changes to the servers here at work. (Riveting reading, I know) The thing is, I'm the admin on a legacy app. This is a nightmare. It means that when it comes to maintenance we're not mission critical. Not until something goes wrong that is. We had to move from one server cluster to another. (These are virtual nodes) Normally, sane operators create the new system in parallel and then redirect from old server to new. They then wait to make sure everything goes well before decommissioning the old one. Nah, let's not do that. Let's just image the old server on the new one and then cut over. The redirect will work fine. No need to wait until after we've had the users try and hit the new server. We'll retire it over the weekend and wipe the old server clean. Folder permission, and all other settings will be lost but really, who cares?

Sunday night ~ 11:00 PM, log on and find that I cannot remote into the new serv…